“Are you walking alone?” Olivia asked.
“Oply ran on ahead with Tom Eames, mad keen to experience the village graveyard ‘for literary reasons’—something about Mary Shelley, who is a lady author, they tell me. It sounded like a wholesome enough activity, so I allowed them to go unchaperoned. Perhaps you’d like to join them there, Cecilia?”
Cecilia, guessing how Mary Shelley’s example might inspire a boy and girl to visit a graveyard without adult supervision, but not wishing to enlighten the girl’s grandmother, quietly demurred. The group continued toward the village.
“How is Mrs. Eames going with repairs to her house after that dreadful Lightbourne shot it down?” Miss Darlington asked.
“Steadily,” Miss Brown replied. “The roof has been patched, and the house managed to float about four feet off the ground this morning, traveling half a mile closer to us until it was stopped by a recalcitrant cow. The biggest problem remains in Thomasina having lost her voice due to all the smoke, for the house responds only to her.”
“Pleasance has a honey and ginger remedy for throat damage, don’t you, dear?” Miss Darlington said.
“Actually it’s a skin cream to thwart vampires from the necks of innocent maidens,” Pleasance said, “but Mrs. Eames is welcome to try it if she wants.”
An uncomfortable silence followed, broken by Olivia saying to Miss Brown, “It’s very Christian of you to accommodate Thomasina’s son at this time.”
“One does like to do one’s duty whenever possible. And Tom’s a good boy. He and Oply get on like—well, like a house on fire, ha ha.”
“Ha ha.”
“Yesterday he offered to help with her math lessons. They spent all afternoon shut up in the library, toiling over multiplication. And last night I thought I heard Oply cry out, and so went to her room, only to find Tom in his nightshirt at the door. He’d also heard the noise, he said, and rushed to see if she was safe. He must have run dreadfully fast to get there before I did, considering his room is upstairs. Indeed, the effort was apparent in his flushed face. Such a fine, upstanding young man.”
“Good heavens, Cecilia, are you all right?” Miss Darlington asked with alarm as Cecilia began coughing.
“Yes, thank you, Aunty,” Cecilia managed to say through her coughs. “I must have swallowed a speck of dust.”
Miss Darlington frowned. “I knew it was a bad idea for you to walk so far.”
“I’m fine, truly,” Cecilia said, but Miss Darlington was having none of it.
“Cecilia is very delicate,” she explained.
The Fairweathers, Olivia, and Miss Brown assessed this with their own eyes. Cecilia stood impassively as they looked her up and down. Growing up with a dozen honorary aunties inures a girl to such inspections.
“Not much like her mother,” Miss Fairweather said in a pursed voice.
Out of the corner of her eye, Cecilia saw Olivia and Miss Brown make the sign of the cross.
“I was relieved to see you not joining the chase toward Northangerland Abbey, Jem,” Miss Brown added. “Imagine if Morvath got hold of her!”
Jane emitted a small sound that could not have been a snigger, for when Cecilia glanced at her she was once again occupied closely with her book. It occurred to Cecilia that, if Captain Lightbourne turned out not to be a double-crossing henchman of her father, but merely an innocent assassin after all, she could hire him to bash Jane Fairweather to death with that little book of battle poems.
“Cecilia will never fall into Morvath’s hands,” Miss Darlington declared, snapping her fan shut. “Nor will she be like her mother, who succumbed to the dubious charms of a handsome and mysterious pirate simply because he had a fancy sword and quoted poetry to her. Are we going for tea or not?”
Pleasance began propelling the wheeled chair fiercely along the road, stirring up enough road dust to make them all cough if they were so inclined. Olivia and Miss Brown stared with unfocused eyes into the middle distance, no doubt imagining fancy swords; Miss Fairweather kept looking over her shoulder as if expecting Morvath to leap out at any moment; Jane read; and Cecilia for her part was so bent on not recollecting Captain Lightbourne’s handsome face and enchanting smile that the company was at The Ancient Mariner, the teahouse at the heart of Ottery St. Mary village, before she even realized.
On the footpath outside they met with Essie and her husband, Lysander, each of whom was carrying a child on their back. They had been introduced a few years ago while tunneling out of a Turkishprison and were known to be the happiest married couple in the Society, to the regret of many who felt fine-boned, black-haired Essie would be particularly suited to an elegant suit of widow’s weeds.
“‘The guests are met, the feast is set,’” Lysander welcomed them, eliciting a smile from Cecilia. The other ladies stared blankly, not being acquainted with Samuel Coleridge’s most famous poem. Lysander winked at Cecilia (for he dimly remembered being Lysander the Lout beneath the polish of marriage, fatherhood, and routine villainy). “We have been exploring and are now regathering our breath before we enter the fray.”
At this, the children, being well-brought-up young pirates, shouted, “Weigh anchor!” and brandished small wooden swords in exuberant fashion. Miss Brown, never one to shirk an educational opportunity, promptly drew her own sword from the scabbard half-hidden among her skirts.
“En garde!” she cried, much to the horror of Miss Darlington’s sensibilities—“A lady should not use French on the street,” she admonished Cecilia, although Cecilia herself had said nothing—and a mock skirmish began. The children, directing their parents like battlehouses, giggled with delight. Olivia tried to confound them with the flapping of her fan, Miss Fairweather called out directions, and Miss Darlington, frowning, furled her parasol and jabbed it like a lace-swathed bayonet at the legs of the participants.
Pleasance took this opportunity to lean close to Cecilia and whisper, “Are you all right, miss?”
“Perfectly fine, dear,” Cecilia said. “It was only a bit of dust.”
“I meant about your murdered mother and hideous, evil father,” Pleasance said, and then flushed as she watched Cecilia’s eyes widen. “Beg pardon, miss, I said the wrong thing, didn’t I? I’m ever so sorry, sometimes bad spirits possess my voice and I just can’t stop them. I meant, ‘your dearly departed’ mother.”
